Thursday, October 13, 2011

Full List of iOS5 Keyboard Layouts

Scripts for which iOS5 does have font support (so it can display web pages, email and other text) but still no keyboard for input are Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Sinhala, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Armenian, Georgian, Lao, and Yi

Certain apps can be used to create custom keyboards that may be useful.

9 comments:

I just stumbled across your blog & love it! What a unique and ever-helpful niche!

I have a question, unrelated to this post, but I wonder if you might help. I'm running OS X Lion, and I want to add the Iñupiaq font from this website: www.alaskool.org/language/inupiaqpb/getfont.htm

I have downloaded the file, and I've tried to follow their directions and look around in other places for help, but I can't figure out how to put the file in the right place to make the font work. Any ideas? Thanks!

It looks like this is an old non-unicode font that maps special characters to Latin codepoints. It is a bad idea to use this for anything, because it may not work with modern computers and nobody can read it without installing the special font. The fonts needed for Unicode inupiaq are already present on your Mac, and you should have no trouble reading this, for example

Hi Tom, I appreciate your good work in this blog.I am a Tamil book publisher venturing into ePub. I am having an issue of not being able to read my Tamil ePub in iPad ibookshelf. I am creating the ePub via adobe indesign (I embed the Tamil font used). The ePub looks fine when read via adobe digital editions. But my iPad(4.3.5) shows some random English char instead of Tamil font. Would be glad if you can throw light on what is happening and guide me in generating an iPad readable Tamil ePub.

I think this may have to do with the font type. ID does not support AAT, which is the only format supported by iOS for complex scripts. The embedded Tamil font in the ePub created from ID is most likely an OpenType font.

My best experience has been with Pages (iWorks). Export to ePub from here and send it to the iPad. Opens and reads very well.

Lion includes another Tamil typeface with regular and bold which can also be used in Pages and embedded into ePub.

Thanks Muthu and Tom. The problem indeed was using non-unicode font. When I used a unicode Tamil font in Indesign and exported it to ePUB (with font embedding), it works in iPAD.Muthu, I am planning to evaluate Pages, thanks to you.My current challenge though is converting all of my publishing house books to unicode. At present we are using non-unicode fonts :(Any suggestions how I could do that ?